“Can it run DOOM?” is a meme question engineers have taken up as a challenge for years now. There is even an entire website dedicated to cataloging every instance of someone porting the original 1993 version of DOOM on anything and everything.
People are constantly putting the game about killing demons on Mars on all manner of nonsense… from an IKEA lamp to a pregnancy test. Now, Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of a tech company called Vercel, has created a CAPTCHA that requires a user to get three kills in DOOM—on the “Nightmare” difficulty setting—if they want to prove that they are human.
Videos by VICE
You Can Now Play ‘Doom’ on a CAPTCHA
The game/captcha, which you can play here, was built using WebAssembly and the v0 web development tool from Vercel. Players have to navigate a level from DOOM while eliminating three enemies to pass the CAPTCHA. The whole thing is an excessively difficult way to gain access to whatever is hiding behind the captcha, which in this case is nothing because it’s just a joke, more of a proof of concept than anything. This will likely never be implemented on any website.
1993’s DOOM was the first PC game I ever played and was the only PC game I owned for several years. But even I struggled to accomplish anything on the CAPTCHA’S “Nightmare” mode thanks to a combination of waning reflexes and the fact that I was never that good at it to begin with, despite the dozens of hours I put into it as a kid.
Thankfully, I quickly found a way to cheese the CAPTCHA. Firing your pistol from the starting location will trigger the enemies far ahead, which causes them to poke out from around their hiding spots. Once a few of them pop out, you can pop them off from afar. And without having to engage them up close, where you will almost assuredly be decimated by the onslaught of projectiles.
